He’s not wrong. The arrogance would be insufferable if he couldn’t back it up, but the man can cook circles around anyone I’ve ever met.
I roll my eyes anyway. “Don’t you two have a workout to get to?”
“Well, it looks like there’s a pretty interesting show happening right here.” Alex grins, clearly in no hurry to leave. “I think the treadmill can wait.” He turns to Brooke, leaning in like they’re old friends sharing secrets. “So what brings you back to town? Besides tormenting my brother.”
“Alex,” Theo says, in the same tone he’s been using since they were kids.
Brooke laughs. “I’m doing a story on Dom’s fighter for The Sporting Standard, and Dom has graciously agreed to let me follow him and Roman around leading up to the big fight in New York. There’s a lot of buzz around it, so my editor is chomping at the bit. Apparently a comeback story with this much history is too good to pass up.”
“Graciously agreed,” I mutter. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Oh, mind your blood pressure, Dom.” She shoots Alex a conspiratorial look that I don’t like one bit. “He’s a little testy about the whole arrangement. I can’t imagine why.”
“Dom? Testy?” Alex puts on an expression of exaggerated shock that belongs in a soap opera. “Our Dom? No, that can’t be right. He’s normally such a ray of sunshine. A delight to be around. Known far and wide for his easygoing nature and carefree attitude.”
“I’m going to kill you,” I tell him pleasantly.
“See what I mean?” Alex says to Brooke. “Sunny disposition. A real people person.”
I suppress a chuckle. Alex does somehow always manage to defuse my mood, though as his older brother I make a point never to let him know that. His ego is big enough already.
Brooke’s laughing now. “I don’t remember you being so funny, Alex. I haven’t been able to get so much as a smile out of your brother, but we’ll see how the next few weeks go.”
“Well, I think this is great.” Alex grins between us. “Get some water under the bridge, bury the hatchet, forgive and forget. All that good stuff. Maybe you two can finally move past everything.”
Theo coughs to cover what is clearly a laugh, and Brooke and I exchange a look that says we agree on exactly one thing:not a chance in hell.
“We should let you get back to it,” Theo says, putting a hand on Alex’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got a workout to get to.”
Theo shoots me a sympathetic look. Somehow he ended up the most mature of all of us despite being the middle child. Kind, steady, the one who smooths things over when the rest of us are ready to throw punches. Alex and Jack, meanwhile, have never met a bad idea they didn’t immediately love.
“Do we though?” Alex asks.
“Yes,” Theo says firmly, turning him toward the weight room. He glances back at Brooke. “Uh, good to see you again, Brooke.”
“You too,” Brooke says. “Both of you. And I mean it about the restaurant. I’ll try to stop by before I head back to New York.”
“You should,” Alex says, letting himself be steered away but twisting to look back at us. “I’ll make you something that’ll ruin New York food for you forever. That’s a promise.” He throws a grin at me. “Good luck, Dom. Try not to kill each other.”
“Mmhmm,” I grumble, waving him off.
His laugh echoes across the gym floor, and I can hear him saying something to Theo that I can’t quite catch but that makes Theo shake his head. Probably already planning how to bring this up at the next family dinner.
Brooke turns back to me, a smile playing at her lips. “So, where were we?”
I take a deep breath and remind myself that I promised to be professional today. “What else do you want to know?”
Her smile widens just a little, like she knows exactly how hard I’m working to keep my cool, and she’s enjoying every second of it. This is going to be a very long few weeks.
CHAPTER 4
Brooke
Coach Ray Delgado’s office at Dark River High School is exactly like I remember it from the days when it was Coach Morrison’s office, back when I went here. It’s small and cluttered, with photos of former athletes covering the wall space, and there’s that faint smell of gymnasium that somehow seeps into everything within a fifty-foot radius of the wrestling mats.
Coach Delgado himself is a compact, weathered man in his sixties with a Dark River Wolves polo stretched across his chest. He’s been talking to me for the better part of an hour about Roman, who got his start wrestling on the mats just down the hall.
“The thing you have to understand,” he says, leaning forward like he’s sharing a secret, “is that Roman didn’t wrestle like a high school kid. He wrestled like someone who’d been doing it for thirty years. The instincts, the timing, the way he read his opponents. You can’t teach that kind of thing. You either have it or you don’t, and Roman had it from day one.”
